What I Learned Spending $3 Million on Facebook Ads

Focus on that interest, re-target this demographic, make sure to exclude certain people… good lord, where do you even begin?

Over the years, I’ve spent over $3,000,000 buying Facebook ads (see below) — and, before I was fired at Facebook, I helped build their ad system.

Bottom-line: I’ve tried anything and everything with Facebook advertising. And now, I’m going to share EXACTLY how you can spend on Facebook ads and get a great ROI for your business.

There are so many advanced tactics, strategies, and tips you can read about Facebook Ads. And I’m going to show you some of them — with a catch.

The truth is, it’s CRITICAL you understand the fundamentals of Facebook ads before you worry about split testing, CPC optimization, or other advanced strategies.

Often times, even “expert” advertisers mess up the simple fundamentals. Then, their mistakes drive up the cost they spend on ads, lower profitability, and cause headaches.

Because we want to build a strong foundation, in this post you’ll learn:

The lessons I learned from spending millions on online advertising

How to setup your first Facebook ad

The exact methods I use to target audiences on Facebook

What makes an ad click-worthy (plus my secrets for creating great CTAs)

The insanely simple method for working the ROI of your ads

And more…

But before we get started, 6 things to consider before you start with Facebook ads...

Over the years, I’ve learned a ton about Facebook online advertising:

Helping build the Facebook Ads platform from the ground up

Spending $3,000,000+ on Facebook ads

Using every tactic, strategy, and trick in the Facebook advertising handbook to make my ads as effective and profitable as possible

Facebook ads are certainly an amazing platform to grow your business, but that doesn’t mean you should jump in head-first.

Here are a few caveats to consider before diving into Facebook ads (or online advertising in general):

Be patient. In my experience, it can take anywhere from 1 day to 6 months to get your online advertising profitable

Not every advertising channel will work for everyone. I’ve spent $100,000+ on Google advertising and only made back $25,000. Damn. Not every advertising channel will work for every business

When you do find a channel that’s profitable, spend as much as you can while you can. When I was advertising on a third-party newsletter, I spent $750 a week and made $1,500 within 2 weeks. That’s an awesome ROI. I didn’t sponsor more than twice a month since I didn’t want to annoy their readers. But then, a friend yelled at me to do more. I moved to four times a month and the ROI stayed the same. I realized there’s a lot of noise online so it’s okay to advertise hard

Advertising decays. Over time you need to refresh your advertising, even if it’s working, to prevent it from going stale. At AppSumo we had a full-time person just refreshing our ads a few times a day with relevant numbers, topics, and news

Profit is all that matters. Ignore people who claim they get some really high click through rates (also known as CTR, or the % of people that actually click their ad). CTR is a vanity metric, and what matters most is ROI. If you are not making money, stop

Look for free marketing opportunities first. I personally encourage people NOT to spend on ads until they’ve exhausted other marketing activities. It’s too easy to spend a lot on ads without great results.

Step-by-step instructions: How to spend your first $100 on Facebook in 10 simple steps

When you first start out with Facebook ads, it’s best to dip your toes in with a fairly small budget and gradually ramp up as you find your sweet spot.

This was my approach when I first started out. I didn’t spend $3,000,000 on Facebook ads right away. I started with just $100 in my first month.

My budget scaled alongside my learnings and results. The more I learned, the better results I saw, and the more budget I’d invest. In month two, I spent $400. Eventually, I ramped up to $100,000+ budget per month.

Below I’ll walk you through 11 steps to get going with Facebook ads (and how to spend your first $100).

You also need to give your campaign a name. Choose something easy and memorable so you can easily identify it in the future.

Facebook recently added the ability to split test ads, which enables you to test advert sets against each other to understand which ads give you the best results. But for your first $100, don’t worry about split testing. Keep it simple.

Note: Do not buy likes. I hate when people brag about how many likes their fan page has. Likes don’t mean much, because Facebook controls communication with your customer(this is why “Boosted” posts have become such a money-driver for Facebook).

When you write Facebook posts you have almost no say on how many people it will reach. It makes sense to create a free fan page and promote it — but don’t spend money towards it in the beginning.

Step 3: Choose your audience

Once your objective is set, you choose the audience you’d like to target with your advert.

One of the most important things to look out for on this page is the audience size gauge.

You want to aim specific, not broad.

Somewhere in the middle of the green section of the dial below is the sweet spot.

When I first started advertising AppSumo and Monthly1K, I tried to target audiences with less than 10,000 people.

The more specific your target group, the more likely you are to have a higher CTR. Plus, the more likely you’ll convert a clicking user to email subscriber (or buying customer) down the line.

One “red herring” to watch for is cost per click (CPC). Anyone who brags about paying an insanely low CPC is likely getting a horrible ROI. The key is balance.

Choosing the right audience is essential for a successful Facebook ads campaigns. You need laser-focused targeting.

For the age and gender category, look at the demographics of your top customers or the people you have email addresses for and target those age groups. The narrower the BETTER. For the Monthly1K course, we targeted 25-40 year-olds who are in the United States.

The other categories, Languages and Connections, I encourage you to leave alone in the beginning.

(Yes, I know the haters out there will want to optimize everything, but I’m trying to streamline the process so you can start investing in ads and learning immediately. Remember, 80% is better than 100% at first — we just want to get you to an ROI.)

For countries: Focus on ONE state / country to begin with. Bonus points if you’re able to focus on a city. Remember, target less than 10,000 people total. If your audience is broad, go more narrow geographically.

One of the most powerful targeting options available is ‘Interests’, this enables you to advertise to people within your target demographics based on their interests (activity on Facebook, Pages they like, and closely related topics).

When trying to figure out your first interest group to target I recommend a few options:

1. Take your 10 best customers and search their email address / name on Facebook

Then go to their Likes by clicking ‘More’ on their profile and selecting ‘Likes’:

Now, create a spreadsheet and list out all the Likes of each of your top 10 customers on Facebook. Focus only on the most relevant Likes to your business. For example:

The goal is to find easy and effective ways you can target new customers. Look for 1-3 similar Likes across your top customers to get started.

2. Find your competitors' customer interests

Go to a competitors' Facebook Page and look at the people who like it. Click on their profiles and add them into your spreadsheet to find their common interests.

We did this the AppSumo competitor MacHeist a couple years ago as we were starting to grow AppSumo.

3. Target a direct competitor

Find an angle that makes your business unique and then use that angle to advertise directly to your competitors' customers.

Simply search for your competitor’s name in the interests box and you can target people who Like your competitor on Facebook, or match your other targeting criteria.

Caveat: DO NOT let Facebook recommend broad interest categories. Facebook’s goal is to get your money. They want to show your ads to whomever is most likely to click. But it’s your job to ensure your ads are targeting people who are valuable to you or your business.

Step 4: Choose your placements

Once you’ve selected the audience for your advert, you’ll see the option to choose the placement (aka where it’ll show on Facebook). You have two options:

Automatic placements: Facebook automatically puts your ads where it feels they’ll work best

Edit placements: You choose where you’d like to reach people

Even for beginners, I recommend you select ‘Edit placements’ so you can select exactly where you’d like your ad to be shown within Facebook’s network.

You’ll see a list of the available placement options for your ad. With your first ad, I recommend you only target Facebook users in the News Feed.

Why just the News Feed?

Audience Network can be a little difficult to configure for a beginner. It’s best to get started with Facebook Ads directly on Facebook... rather than Facebook Ads that appear on other channels

Instagram ads are a whole different kettle of fish

I’ve found right-hand column ads are effective for retargeting, but with the CTR so low it’s not worth it when you’re starting

Mobile vs Desktop

Mobile ads could make sense for your business, but it depends greatly on your service. If your landing page is fully optimized for mobile, it can be worth targeting Facebook users across all devices. But if your product is a web-app, then mobile feed ads might convert significantly lower than desktop ads.

Mobile social ads now drive more impressions and clicks than desktop, but desktop still has a slight edge when it comes to conversions. Consider creating a separate ad set with just mobile targeted ads. I’ve seen promising results doing this.

Step 5: Set your budget

Start small. Set your daily budget at $3.33 (this’ll ensure you don’t spend more than $100 a month).

On Facebook, the average cost per click (CPC) is about $0.35 globally and about $0.28 in the U.S. (source)

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when thinking about your bid amount:

If you try to bid too low, your ads may not get the exposure they need, and you won’t reach your goals

Don’t worry about bidding a high amount. You’ll still end up paying the lowest amount possible in the auction to get your ads delivered

Aim for $0.75 a click. (Don’t worry if that seems high, it’s only 4.4 clicks). The point is to get some clicks to your ad going and then you can lower the amount.

A few notes for you to benchmark your performance with:

On most paying products we’ve advertised, the conversion from click to paying customer is about 0.1-0.2%

Conversion rate to collecting an email has been around 20%

Again, remember it can vary wildly based on your industry. But, this should give you a rough north star to aim for.

Step 6: Create your Ad

This is where you create your advert. Generally, I have a couple of pieces of advice when it comes to creating winning ads:

1. Keep the images simple, ideally of yourself or something not boring. Look at this boring advertisement below. Yawn! Such a neat idea for a product. But boring execution, with an image blending in with so many other images we see online

2. Try to create an ad that uses natural text versus something that seems like an advertisement. Imagine what you naturally write / post on Facebook compared something that seems like a paid placement.

Here’s an example from AppSumo of one of our high-performing “natural” ads:

Step 7: Choose the format

For News Feed ads, Facebook offers six different formats. Let me simplify it for you: Choose Single Image.

Single Image ads in the desktop News Feed tend to have a higher engagement rate than right column ads. Plus, with single image ads' similarities to organic News Feed posts, users are familiar with interacting with this type of post.

Step 8: Choose your image(s)

Facebook single image ads enable you to upload and test six variations of images. With only $100 budget, six variations is a little too complex. Start with one or two images max.

For single image ads, Facebook recommends the following:

Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels

Image ratio: 1.91:1

To maximize advert delivery, use an image that contains little or no overlaid text

Don’t: Whatever you do, don’t use any of Facebook’s stock images. Stock images are the best way to ruin a great ad. Don’t use low-quality images either and definitely avoid stealing images from Google.

Images of people work incredibly well. Preferably their faces. And try to use a bit of contrast, too. That’ll make your image stand out. You could use images of your team or your customers (with their permission, of course).

If you have a designer on your team, get them to whip up your ad. If you don’t have a designer, tools like Canva — or Googling "royalty free images" make it incredibly simple to design beautiful looking images in no time.

Step 9: Add your copy

Once you’ve added an image or two to your ad, you have to create the supporting copy.

The first step is to choose the Facebook Page that will represent your business in the ad (all single image News Feed ads are promoted by Facebook Pages).

Then you need to choose your destination. This’ll be your website or the landing page you’d like to drive traffic too.

Pro tip: Create consistency. If someone clicks your ad, something in your image or copy has grabbed their attention. After clicking, they should land on a webpage that reinforces the message you shared in your ad.

There are now four key pieces of copy you need to include with your advert:

Headline: Add a brief headline to tell people what your ad is about. I like to give something away free with the headline (see "Free Growth Hacker Tips" in the example below). You only have 25 characters to use here. Be wise

Text: The text appears about the advert and is similar to a status on normal Facebook posts

Call to Action (CTA): Facebook has a range of button call-to-actions you can use within your ad. Choose “Learn More”

News Feed Link Description: This appears below the Headline. Use this space to add additional text to emphasize why people should visit your website and to reinforce your CTA

Here’s an example:

4 tips for creating incredible ads

As a quick recap, here are four tips to help your ads stand out and drive clicks:

1. Choose images that stand out

Remember, on Facebook you’re not just competing with other ads for attention, you’re up against wedding photos, cat videos, #blessed posts, and other content posted by friends and family.

If you want people to click on your ads, they have to stand out. I tend to use images on a bright background or anything with a bit of contrast to stand out from the blandness of the News Feed.

2. Use Calls-to-Actions

Including a Call-to-Action within your Facebook Ads is a great way to let the user know what to expect on the other side of the ad.

CTAs might not directly increase your clicks or make your ad more pleasing to the eye, but it’s a great tactic to improve your conversions and decrease your cost per conversion.

I love to use the "Headline" part of Facebook Ads to include the CTA.

3. Add social proof

There are a couple of reasons that might put someone off clicking your ad:

Scared of losing money

Worried about making the wrong choice

How can you overcome these two challenges?

Use social proof to show the reader why they should care.

The ‘Text’ section of your Facebook ad is a great place to include some social proof around your product or service. For example, you could: mention how many businesses use your product, include a testimonial from a customer, talk about your experience.

The goal with social proof is to alleviate any worries someone may have about your product and give them a reason to car.

4. Use the “Learn More” button

Through a bunch of testing, we found the “Learn More” button converted better than other buttons or not having a button at all.

These findings were also backed up by AdEspresso who found that the “Learn More” CTA returned a 22.5% higher click-through rate than “Sign Up” (source).

Step 10: Measure your ROI

Now you’ve gotten started. Congrats… but the real thing is profit. So how do you track your ROI and make your money back?

To start, do stupid ghetto math. Here’s how I do it with advertising OkDork:

I spend around $3.35 / email per sign up.

On some emails I will proudly mention Sumo (free tool for getting more email subscribers).

Each new customer makes us around $515 after refunds. So I do back of the envelope math as follows:

Product Profit = $515
Email Cost = $3.35
$515 / $3.35 = 153

So if 1 out of 153 people via new email signups buy Sumo then buying ads is profitable.

For your business the numbers might be a little different, but a similar formula will help you work out your ROI.

Best article about facebook ads i have ever read thanks. i have question that facebook ad budget (100 bucks for month) is still effective on 2019 ? i have heard facebook ads getting expensive and daily budget needs to 10 or even 20 dollar and of course i dont have that budget.

Lots of important information, than you. I landed here because I fail and fail and fail over again trying to promote my micro service with inspiring quotes. Maybe it's just useless. Can you guys give it a glance a tell me what you think? It's 366quotes.com. Thank you in advance.

Thanks! Very helpful. My tshirt business has seen excellent exposure in 3 weeks (26k reach, 200+ likes) but far fewer sales. I have spent about $300 on Facebook ads. I will try your tips to see if I can increase my ROK

Hi! This is an amazing article! In my opinion, finding your audience is a key moment. If you just started your business use your competitors' audience! It's the surest way to target the right people. You can do it easily with LeadEnforce.com. Here you'll get a custom list from your competitor's Facebook groups and further, you just share this audience to your Facebook business account and use it for running ads.

Yes. Just make sure you create ads that connect with your audience so you are not paying a boatload per click/action. Also, make sure you have conversion tracking installed so you can properly attribute conversions to FB/Insta ads.

This is a great article. I'm trying to set up detailed targeting but it wont let me access the suggestions/additional interests part! what is wrong 🙁 🙁 🙁 i'm so frustrated - I'm stuck at this point :(((( buhuu. Please help

Awesome article. I'm 1 month in and I've ramped from $100 to about $450 monthly budget. I have a small countertop store and I'm targeting single family homeowners in my vicinity. Without getting into the endless metrics let's assume I'm doing a decent job with my ad and the settings (350 clicks - 30 days). How long before I can expect real results to kick in. And I mean roughly how long....I'll give it a year. I've been told it can take 9 months or so...This is not an impulse item of course so I expect this to have to take hold over time. I did catch one great order which made me enough for 3 months of advertising. Any reply is priceless. Thank you..Cliff

Results don't take time to "kick in" - you should be evaluating your campaigns on an ongoing basis. Make sure you have conversion tracking set up so you can identify the lead source with confidence. If you are not tracking conversions, it will be very difficult to attribute ROI to FB ads. Ads that are targeted well and contain relevant copy/images should be producing results very quickly.

You could also try video ads. Again, on fiverr, find amazing talent to create a simple 15 - 30 second video with your product imagery. Seriously, if your ad hasn't caught someone's attention in the first few seconds, most people may be scrolling by.

I am a newbie, not an expert. I have not had huge success with ads myself yet. But if you are spending $15 per day on ads with many clicks on an item that is not an impulse by (like for example, clothes or gifts) then you could have a very good product people are interested in, but may need to capture their email on your website to follow up with them somehow. Maybe through in a "Free" offer if they enter their email. A free consultation phone or in person could be the reward.

Is there any metric or reporting feature to determine what percentage of total possible impressions with your audience your ad is appearing in, and, if the percentage is low, can you determine if it's low from too low of a bid, or too low of a CTR compared to other people advertising to the same audience? Or is there no way to get this info other than conclusions inferred from trial and error?

this post has generated incredible feedback, and it serves as one of the ideal ways to promote your company’s products and services. Positive feedback and engagement is necessary. I learned this when I started my own online business, and I based my approach on ‘content is king’. Since every responsible business practice understands that the content on their website is king, I wanted to differentiate my product offering by providing insightful content that would generate traction with readers. Something a little offbeat, perhaps even mildly inflammatory is bound to get lots of hits with readers. Then I marketed my content to readers with video remarketing strategies. Fortunately I found a boutique company that provides excellent services. Its name is Treepodia, and they are experts at generating converting loyalty videos. All I can say is that the results speak for themselves – higher ROI, engagement, conversion, click through rates – you name it.

Good article with some great insights. I am looking to receive more sales from the USA but from Australia it could be to expensive? We are a very small business that sells unique Aussie made gifts. Our largest order to date has been 190 hand painted emu eggs with a boomerang in a wooden box to Crystal Cruises BUT over 80% of our sales are to single consumers.

I heard that fb algorithm is getting smarter and now (Feb 2018) it will work better with a large audience of 2million for example. I know people who place several targeted interests in one adset and have an audience size in millions and it works very well for them (cheap leads). Any update about this?

You also say don’t use any of Facebook’s stock images but then you say we can Google and use "royalty free images". Don't they have the same quality as stock images?

Karl, My mentor for FB advertising has told me the same thing. It should whittle it down and the algorithm should spend money on who is clicking through and then stop spending money on who isn't. Now how much exactly does it not look for these people that aren't clicking through, I don't know. So you would have to consider some sort of a loss.

Someone else just told in on another blog they're using small audiences with less than 1 million and it works really good for them too. This is also a well known guy. So maybe both ways can work somehow.

Hello, I really enjoyed reading this article but I am curious about the 10,000 figure that you came to. After running ads of our own using this strategy we didn't find any conclusive data showing that this strategy worked or didn't work. Would you be able to elaborate how you came to this number? Thank you

Hey Noah, I was setting up an ad on FB and was curios about the new "Continue w/FB" buttons. A high level marketing friend of mine says that he personally clicked on one in an ad re: new car purchase and recieved a prompt reply from the advertiser as well as every other dealership around (he said over 100 calls in one week!) Does FB sell these leads to other businesses? Thanks for you input!!! Bob

Thank you for sharing this information!! I'm new to social media marketing and I feel like no matter what I do, I'm not getting the results I hope for. Is posting a one-day ad a bad idea? Say every Monday your business has a special sale. Is that not a good thing to just run on Mondays?

It sounds like you could have a lack of awareness before asking for the user's click. You could also just not have catchy-enough creative (photo and copy). You could also not be targeting a quality audience. Truthfully, there could be a bunch of problems.

Here is a strategy for you to consider to create more awareness:

Run a 3-day ad (Saturday, Sunday, Monday) that promotes the Monday sale.

You would use creative on Saturday and Sunday that builds awareness for the coming Monday sale with a "Learn More" CTA and a landing page that tells about the upcoming (or recurring) sale. Set up a Facebook pixel on your website, so that you can track the visitors of this page. You may taper down your ad spend on these days, because you do not expect to make sales on these days.

You would then use a slightly adjusted piece of creative on Monday that shows the sale is happening, and include a "Shop Now" CTA. You may adjust your target audience to include those who clicked through to your landing page on Saturday and Sunday (or even better -- only target those people, because they seem interested). You may also taper up your ad spend on Monday, because you intend to make as many sales as possible.

The insights of this article are really useful. I must say although that I thought it would be more extensive and explored different campaigns. Nonetheless, great job.

I would like also to post a question:
When creating a traffic campaign on Facebook, the minimum budget is 5€ ( in Europe).
Is there any way I can create campaigns optimized for traffic generation (click) with a lower daily budget? Right now I've been using interaction campaigns with 1-2€ daily and I feel the results ( in terms of clicks) are much lower than in traffic campaigns.

Hi Noah, very helpful post!I'm now your fan! And FYI, I'm using your less than 10,000 target strategy and the CPM is unbelievable! More than $100!
My question, Should I continue or stop? You don't mention about this crazy CPM in the post. Once again, Can I know your comment about this? Thank you!

Hi Noah ! Again, I'm reading this again and again and again since you post it before the updated version here. I just kept reading this tips like for almost 10 times or more. Our campaign was keep on improving and better. We were on our way to spend $5000 daily on Facebook Ads. We really focused on your creating images tips and the Ad Copy.

Are you spending 5K daily on one ad or a series of ads with different objectives and audiences? We spend 1K daily and are struggling to spend more without hurting our ad performance and ROI. Facebook seems to optimize ad performance for us around $250-300/day per ad.. have you seen this?

This is excellent. I value the advice and thank you for sharing so much useful info. Having this means that it all starts boiling down to what it should, good products that reach people who really want them.

You sexy boy! I've been literally smashing my head against the wall desperately looking for a guide like this, by a pro who is genuine. Can't wait to get started now! Love the point on mobile vs desktop placement. So true that as much as we all love mobiles, navigation via desktop is always more pleasant. Thank you!

we just posted an ad campaign on FB. Our daily limit was set to $500. On the first day, the spend was ~$450, 2nd day it dropped to $200, today is the third day, but it looks like the spending will drop again. Any idea why? We haven't made any changes.

Thank Noah! I'm working on my first webinar for my business and doing a ton of research on Facebook Advertising (topic of webinar) and I really liked your article... if you don't mind, I'll be putting this page in a list of resources for my listeners.

Keeping it simple is key! It is so easy to get lost in the weeds when you first start advertising on any platform. Frankly, a lot of the services haven't made it that simple to advertise in the way you outlined here. Remember, one action beats 1,000 thoughts!

Is this post still relevant? I see you discourage the use of advertising for mobile. (?) All in all it looks like great information it's just I'm about to launch an ad campaign and noticed the article is from 2 years ago and figured out that maybe things have change ever since.

He didn't say not to advertise for mobile. He just pointed out that many websites are not mobile friendly ... so you have to decide for yourself. Does your website have a mobile version? If so, use it! Best of luck!!!

In my case Facebook ads have been a dismal failure. The incubation period in my industry is at least a year. It takes an extraordinary amount of dollars to first get likes, followers and eventually a client. I have gone back to more traditional methods and the results are much better than any Facebook ad I ever ran.

"Step 10: Avoid showing your ads to mobile traffic. You can choose this from the Power Editor but I won’t get into that tool at this time. Most likely your page is not mobile designed and that traffic is less likely to purchase or sign up for an email address. After you get your campaign working that is something you can begin optimizing for mobile."

This post is fantastic! You break everything down into understandable parts. Thank you!

I've done a small amount of Facebook advertising and found it to be useless. My understanding of Facebook is that it doesn't covert to sales. It might as well be titled DistractionBook as there are so many "clickbait" articles and pictures, especially on the newsfeed, competing for your attention. Ads get lost amid all the noise.

i have to sites, one is our bread and butter, the other less so. i got really cheap likes but you're right, just because i got 1000 like in one campaign it doesn't matter if i'm not getting new leads. After reading your article i think i will invest in getting more clicks to the site in hopes to convert and get emails. question though, what if you website is optimized for mobil. Do you recomend using mobil ads then? also, what do you think about lead ads. Wouldn't they increase email collections

We are a bunch of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community.
Your site provided us with useful information to work on. You have performed a formidable
task and our whole group will likely be grateful to you.

We just started adverting on Facebook for our beauty salons. The idea was to promote offers to ladies with high end smartphone devices. I started with click to website ads, and the results were amazing. A friend suggested to try website conversion ads on Facebook. Unfortunately, I did not get a response like I got for clicks to website ads. Both the campaigns were run at same settings. I wonder why the latter did not work. I was under the impression that conversion ads would perform better than click to website ads. But that did not happen for us. Moving back to click to website ads. Will now test carousel ads.

This is by far the best share I've read about starting your first advertising campaign! I'm taking my site live in a couple of weeks, and I can't wait to share my experience and hopefully positive results! Thanks, Noah!!

Thank you again Chief Sumo. If any new sumo-lings would like more info on facebook ads, and SEM, Chief sponsored Tommy Griffith's second online class "Paid Search Marketing Course," unfortunately the promo is no longer going on 🙁 but Tommy's material is phenomenal and has so many tutorials and walkthrus (similar to this one Chief Sumo has so kindly blessed us with) that'll save you lots of headaches.

Noah,
Thanks for this radical info. I have been pouring over your blog post on Tim Ferris' blog you did a few years ago about creating a digital product (chihuahua book) and selling it online using Facebook and Reditt ads etc, Where in the process of creating a digital product would you start use Facebook ads? I plan on using the app, Fiverr to source people to do data research on a few topics and also see how many people on Facebook my potential market could be. Your help is much appreciated.

Hi Noah, great article. I followed it to the "T" but I'm about a week into the FB campaign and I only have 20 "reach" and no clicks of the 20. I believe I had the target audience narrowed to about 8500. Should I broaden my "target audience" to "reach" more people?

I'm actually practicing what was in this article since April. I would say 95% of what was written here is very correct. And that 5% might be your personal case, or when you start scalling it.

I guess there are two reasons why you don't get clicks: 1) the $ amount of your bid, and 2) the narrow audiences. Try to work with these variables. Also if your ad is already sometime live and it doesn't perform the likelihood that Facebook graded it as underperforming is very ight. And by doing so Facebook limits your bidding. Try to start a new same typ of campaign.

Currently what I do is I start with oCPC and then when it starts to run well I switch to bid CPC. I noticed when the CTR is about 2%-3% Facebook continues to run your ad even if you lowered your bid.

I was trying to create my first newsfeed ad but I have not been able to insert a bitly link in the newsfeed text. I get an error notification that reads something like "Your ad text cannot contain 2 punctuation marks or signs in a row. Please remove these to continue". Any idea what needs to be done here?

For a small business owner like myself, this is a great starting point. I will be doing some FB ads when I have offers and I'll be using this guide to get started. Comments are very full of insights too!

Thanks for putting this together Noah. I followed along step by step for a website click campaign but I'm currently receiving 1 click per $3.50 - the only thing I did differently from your guide was selecting "automatically optimize bids" instead of manually bidding at .75c - should I try switching to the .75c manual bid?

This is such great info for me right now because I am planning on starting my first facebook ad to a website very soon. I have done some facebook Like ad campaigns for other people's facebook pages, but I have not made an ad leading to a website yet.

Question, how do you refresh an ad on facebook? I didn't realize this was even a thing!

Okay, so maybe I will just answer my question myself. When reading this post, I was thinking that refreshing the ad was something complicated, but after doing some research, it's basically just changing the images, wording, etc of the ads from time to time, which I had already been doing, so I guess I'm good to go!

This was a really great article Noah, thank you for taking the time to write it.

I've played around with the "boost post" feature on my companies fan page, targeting 10 general interests related to my field (I make outdoor/survival gear so I was targeting interests in the military, hiking, certain brands of knives, etc) while trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. The last campaign I ran was for $100, 7 days, reached 22k people, and generated about $270 in sales, avg a 2% conversion rate.

I'm going to to apply your formula to my next go around, and I will report back with how it goes.

G-day Noah,
Thank you so much for writing this post, I have been wanting to try my hand at paid advertising through facebook for a while now, and this has made it much easier to jump in!
I have a question regarding your SumoMe tool, I use Weebly to set up my websites because I know NOTHING about coding and it's all drag and drop. I'd love to be abele to use the SumoMe tool, but I don't know how to add the code to my site. If you or any other readers of this article know how, I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks again, your emails and articles are an inspiration, nice work mate!

Love it. I am not a beginner and in my own exploration of facebook ads with several clients and small budgets, I always opt for tight targeting and manually bypass the "easy" options facebook provides in favor of anything marked "advanced". Facebook has a brilliant system for micro-targeting but many still think the biggest reach wins. I set up a batch of ads, see which one does the best, and start dropping the price on it. Tweaking the ads is a critical part of the campaign. And when you do it with a CPC model manually bidding, you kind of have to be on it, making changes to not waste funds. The ad manager has a robust analytic system for really seeing how they perform. And much of that is all on the regular space. Power Editor is where they test new features so good to use it if you understand the system. I'll be keeping an eye on you, Noah! Great resource. Thanks!

Great article and insights. I have been using a tool called Fan Harvest for my fb ads and boy, I have never seen such great CTR and follow up. What the tool does is, you can give it your competitors' facebook pages and it will analyze them and give you those people who are REAL human beings who are genuinely interested in your competitors.

With a campaign that I ran, I had about 5000 people from the tool and spending $10 on a like campaign I reached 2300 of them in a day. I got 92 likes, 21 people visited my site and they spent 5 minutes on average. Had 54 page views.

Noah, this is great since I just started Facebook ads two weeks ago. So far getting 1000% ROI and have been ignoring CTRs. I'm glad I have been doing some things right so far. The thing I really want to add is the "Learn More" button but I can't seem to find that option when I'm creating an AD. Regardless, this was really helpful and gave me more confidence to increase my daily AD budget. Thanks a lot!

Awesome! Only problem is I am unable to input my own interests according to the likes of the competitors. The ad forces me to choose from categories. I input it in the line but it disappears. Anybody know how to deal with this?

I just wanted to update and include that, as of right now, Facebook does not allow entering in a specific Group/Page such as a competitor. I have been in contact with Facebook about it and that is what they told me. Correct me if I'm wrong. 🙂

Your wrong, I spend alot of money on facebook ads aswell and often target competitors facebook pages, its a great, method, and great article useful practice advice. At the end of the day though, your advert has to be good, as the consumers now have keen eyes! Also depending on your niche I have found targeting the older generation very profitable in some instances eg 55-60

Hey Noah,
Thanks so much for this! Some questions though:
I went in to amend one of our ads, and the layout is quite different.
For example, we ONLY had the option of a right hand ad, the option for the Newsfeed is not even there.
Also, I cannot choose “Call to Action” (learn more) -that box does not appear.
There is something called Conversion Tracking Pixel, which you dont seem to have – what is this?
Also, in the examples you give, you don’t appear to include a bit.ly link, but then you recommend this, yes?
Thanks again!

Really great help, Noah. Thank you so much.
Noah, this might be for you in case you didn't yet heard of it:
In general. its a pain to determine who is your right audience. I got an unbelievable tool that lets me search for very specific keywords. It then crawls through facebook events, groups and pages that match that keyword. Then you can select that specific group and export those FB IDs into a cvs file. Then you can import this custom list into your own ads via custom audience. Its one of the sickest tools Ive used.
Its called audiencemakr, cost $10. But no clue where to get it.
I got it from a dude I follow.

WOW, this article is really good about Facebook ads, because there are less course about Fb ads compared to Adwords, but really people do spend on facebook huge amount of money. i spend a lot and not gained much, my ads targeted almost 80 million people but you said less than 10,000..

Thanks Noah!
I went in to amend one of our ads, and the layout is quite different.
For example, we ONLY had the option of a right hand ad, the option for the Newsfeed is not even there.
Also, I cannot choose "Call to Action" (learn more) -that box does not appear.
There is something called Conversion Tracking Pixel, which you dont seem to have - what is this?
Also, in the examples you give, you don't appear to include a bit.ly link, but then you recommend this, yes?
Thanks again!

Hi folks,
I basically agree with Noah's opinion. However, I do have 3 more recommendations.
I am sorry for my English - my mother tongue ist German...

-) Include a question in the header of your ad. E.g. "Want to become an entrepreneur?" and then
do the proof that Noah's course (or your product) works... Goal: in my point of view it makes sense, that only those who wan't to become an entrepreneur should click.

-) You can increase conversion rate, if you DON'T direct the people to an external website.
Let's integrate a landingpage in a facebook-tab of your facebook-fanpage. My experience is that
people feel uncertain if the landingpage ist not within facebook.

-) I agree with Noah that fans of a facebook-page can be valueless. For sure, having their
email-address is the best case. However, have you already tried to get both (fan & email-address)?
In my point of view, the worst case is the following: they click on your FACEBOOK-AD and they DON'T
SIGN UP and they DON'T BECOME a fan. They are lost forever.
As a result: integrate your landingpage within a facebook-tab of your fansite AND integrate a facebook-likegate. Just try it.

-) Regarding Noah's profitability accounting: you should not ignore the following formula: Cost per Acquisition has to be lower than Customer Lifetime Value. So, try to estimate CLV.

-) Converting Facebook-Fans into paying customers: there are a lot of tactics to convert facebook fans...

With all those things we were able to decrease cost per email from € 3.- to € 0,8.-.

Laurenz, thanks for adding this to Noah's great tutorial. Building my page now, but how do I do what you said: "integrate your landingpage within a facebook-tab of your fansite AND integrate a facebook-likegate." ? Noah, if you have tips on this or another tutorial I'd love to see it.

Fantastic, I'm going to have to book mark and come back later to digest the entire post.

Okay some questions - is there a niche where FB advertising does not work well? I've tried it with transport and the interaction was minimal and ROI non-existent. My transport business is hyper-local and very specialised so in theory we should have been able to get a better response. The reality of course was far different.

Yes, I only use the narrowed down local audience and restricted to Essex, UK. I'm thinking that unless people have an immediate need for what you're promoting then they will be oblivious to your ads. That in my opinion makes AdWords more powerful as the adverts are shown when a person is searching for what you're selling.

In your case, have you thought about a scenario that a user saw your ad on Facebook, but he didn't purchase because he didn't need it immediately. But after couple days, when he needs it, he thinks up of your ad and search it in Google. Facebook maybe potentially drive your business.

You need brand awareness, and must be filling a need or service lacking which there is a market for. If you offer something unique or better over your competition then make that obvious to potential new customers.

Try hiring a marketing manager to review your strategies. Dropping $400 for a professional company to help could be worth the investment if you're completely missing your marketing through lack of experience.

Consider money spent as college tuition, you're learning and your business is growing. Don't give up, if you truly believe your business has potential to succeed. But you must be realistic.

Dang Noah, that's just about the best explanation of how to get started with Facebook Ads I've seen. I've tried out some ads with mixed results just to see how it works, which was a decent learning experience, but I should have waited until I could read this! Thanks, I can't wait to read the next posts (and no I haven't spent any $$ on ads for my How to Make $1K/month work ... the validation steps you teach made that unnecessary (oh, thanks again!).

When you advertise with the ultimate goal of selling a higher priced item, have you seen better results from driving the traffic straight to the high-priced item or from giving something away for an email address and then working up toward a bigger purchase?